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Powercolor X800 GTO 16 Video Card Review

We at OCC strive to be different; although you will see some familiar games benchmarked you might also see some games that few other sites use.

How we benchmark and or overclock
There are many devices used to benchmark and overclock a graphics board, at Occ we will be using Fraps, Ati Tool and RivaTuner. When available we will also use performance testing from the game itself, some time demos and 3rd party benchmark programs. Prior to each result we will specify which program was used for the benchmark and what settings were used from the game to achieve our totals. By our preference for overclocking ATI graphic boards we will use, ATI Tool .24 and for nVidia Graphic boards, RivaTuner 2.0 rc 15.8. Lets get started; the Power Color X800 GTO 16 graphics board is a mainstream board, which is preoverclocked right out of the box. Its core settings are set at 400 MHz and memory settings at 490x2 for a total of 980 MHz. For testing purposes I did attempt to overclock the GPU achieving a stable overclock at 430/550x2. Also while the GPU was cool on a fresh boot, I was able to obtain an overclock of 481/589x2. The card ran stable for quite some time and it was benched with Fraps on Call of Duty 2. (Results will be last) Unfortunately while trying to test other games at this speed the graphics froze and I was not able to obtain any results. For those of you who are not familiar to overclocking, there is no need to worry this mainstream Graphics board packs a lot of punch right out of the box and will achieve great results on what ever game you choose.

Testing Setup

AMD 3700+ CPU

DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR

1 GB OCZ Platinum rev2 (512x2)

Enermax 600w PSU

Power Color X800 GTO 16 256mb

XFX (nVidia) 6800 GT 256mb

Albatron (nVidia) 6600LE 256mb

Windows XP Pro SP2

DirectX 9.0c

Catalyst 6.2 Drivers

NVidia 81.98 Drivers

Gaming Benchmarks

Far Cry: Hardware OC (Ubisoft Volcano)

F.E.A.R. (Performance test)

Doom3: Misc. Levels (FRAPS)

Call of Duty 2: Stalingrad (FRAPS)

Quake4: Hardware OC (Guru 3d Demo)

Need For Speed Most Wanted (FRAPS)

* You may notice that in some games the Albatron 6600LE produced a result, this is a result of the actual FPS being less than 5 or the benchmark would not run at the settings posted.

Benchmark: Far Cry
I will begin our benchmarks with Far Cry. The three resolutions tested were 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024.

The Power Color X800 GTO 16 stood up pretty well to the XFX 6800 GT both stock and overclocked in my Far Cry Benchmarks. Frames per second were very close (between 5 to 10 fps) until the resolution of 1280x 1024 was tested. That’s where the X800 GTO 16 lost some of its velocity.